Delta Judge Denies Ex-Northwest Flight Attendants’ Pay Bid

Nov. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Delta Air Lines Inc. flight
attendants who worked for Northwest Airlines Corp. before its
2008 acquisition lost a bid for an order to force Delta to
immediately align their compensation with peers who already
worked for the carrier.

In a lawsuit filed in March, the flight attendants claimed
Delta withheld higher profit-sharing checks from more than 7,500
pre-merger Northwest flight attendants based solely upon their
prior union membership.

U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz in Minneapolis today
denied the flight attendants’ request for a preliminary order
pending final resolution of the case. In the same 37-page
ruling, he also rejected the airline’s bid for dismissal.

“If the court were to order Delta to grant pay raises and a
larger profit-sharing distribution to plaintiffs, and Delta were
later to prevail in this litigation, Delta would be unlikely to
be able to recoup its losses,” Schiltz said.

Schiltz also ruled that the five flight attendants pursuing
the case can only pursue relief for themselves and not for those
ex-Northwest workers who didn’t join in the litigation.

Northwest and Atlanta-based Delta combined to create what
was then the world’s biggest airline in a transaction valued in
April 2008 at $2.75 billion.

Continental Merger

The largest carrier is now operated by Chicago-based United
Continental Holdings Inc., the product of a $3.47 billion merger
of Continental Airlines Inc. and UAL Corp. last year.

The flight attendants’ union that represented Northwest’s
workers agreed before the merger to a contract containing wage
concessions to help Northwest emerge from bankruptcy
proceedings.

The union last year lost an election in which it sought to
represent all flight attendants at the post-merger airline. It
has filed a complaint with the National Mediation Board
contending Delta interfered with the election.

The five flight attendants who brought the suit claim the
airline discriminated against them. In addition to the court-ordered injunction, they seek an award of back pay to compensate
them for allegedly lower wages and profit-sharing.

Delta asked Schiltz to throw out the case, arguing that the
federal Railway Labor Act doesn’t require them to automatically
align terms and conditions of employment for the formerly
separate groups following a merger.

“Delta mis-characterizes plaintiffs’ claims,” Schiltz said
in his ruling. “Plaintiffs do not claim the RLA required Delta
to align compensation. Instead plaintiffs alleged that Delta’s
refusal to align compensation was unlawful because it was
motivated by anti-union animus.”

Union Challenge

The airline also argued that the flight attendants’ union’s
National Mediation Board challenge froze Delta’s ability to
alter attendants’ compensation, pending the review, as well as
the court’s ability to decide the issue.

Schiltz disagreed, saying the court’s resolution of the
flight attendants’ claims wouldn’t affect the board’s
determination on the interference issue.

The judge did rule that Delta’s interpretation of the labor
law as barring it from aligning pay -- as he said it maintains
it would do after the representation issue is resolved -- was
legitimate and not pretextual.

Accordingly, he concluded the flight attendants were
unlikely to succeed in their lawsuit and that neither a threat
of irreparable harm nor the public interest justified an
immediate court order equalizing compensation.

“We are reviewing the full decision now,” Gina Laughlin, a
Delta spokeswoman, said in an e-mailed statement. “We are
pleased that the court agreed with Delta that the request for a
preliminary injunction should be denied.”